Fantastic Maths PD!

This week has been a super short week for me... Public holiday on Monday and the kids had a Pupil Free Day on Tuesday, while we had an all day training session. We spent the day looking at Numeracy blocks with Ann Baker.... it was amazing! Have you ever had the chance to work with Ann? I thought she was fantastic... so knowledgeable and so passionate about teaching Maths... I came away all motivated to try some of the things she was talking about!

Ann was talking about the importance of purposeful Maths learning.. she shared lots of ideas about how to use Problematised Situations in the classroom. Basically, it's putting learning into context, and although I've done this to a degree, I think I could do it a whole lot better! I'd love to work out a way that we could include these types of problems in our Discovery Time (Developmental Play sessions) too.

The other big thing she talked about was the importance of reflection at the end of a lesson and I know this is my weakness! I always have the best of intentions to have a really rigorous reflection section to my maths lessons, but somehow we always run out of time (common problem for teachers I know!) and we end up doing a quick 3 minute share instead.

Here's a link to her website if you want to explore further... and here's a couple of her books that I have used before...

Great for teaching mental strategies... comes with posters too!

I have only used parts of this book when I was doing Maths Demo Lessons in classes, but I thought it was great!

So... my goal for next week.. I will do reflections for EVERY maths lesson and I'm going to have a go at trying some Problematised Situations as well.... 

I'll let you know how I go! :)